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Field notes in their raw form. |
Learn more about my research interests, including what I've done, what I'm working on now, and where I want to go in the next few years.
Current research
Political Violence and its legacy
Since 1997, I have had an on-going project that examines the legacy of political violence, specifically in the case of Mongolia, political repression. I have been examining the impact of political violence on the shaping of identity in the contemporary political arena and the everyday lives of people in Mongolia.
Among other things, I have looked at how different political parties confronted the issue of rehabilitation and compensation for the victims of political repression in my 1999 article "Blame, guilt and avoidance." I also am looking at the category of "victim." Although it might seem obvious whether or not a particular person is a victim of political repression, it is in fact far from clear. This becomes especially important when the label of "victim" gives a person moral and political capital and thus the ability to exert influence on political decisions, public opinion and so forth. Exactly who is a victim and who is not a victim raises important questions about identity and politics. But it also goes further and raises questions about the possibility of reconciliation and coming to terms with the past.
Given the importance of this category to work on human rights, reconciliation, truth commissions and memory studies, it intrigues and puzzles me that it has been left almost completely unexamined in existing research. I thus see an integral part of this larger project on political violence being the problematization of the label of "victim."
The Death of the Buddhist State
My next book also deals with political violence. But rather than looking at the legacy and representations of violence (as I continue to do) it will focus on the late 1920s and 1930s. I am not going to go into too much detail here, since I'm still working out the details, and doing the research. But in short, I've come to take a slightly longer term view of the violence of the 1930s in Mongolia than many people seem to. I am looking at the larger context in which the violence took place. Most people seem to leave it at a relatively high-level geopolitical level of explanation. In the simplest form, this boils down to "The repressions happened because Stalin said to do it." Most arguments are more subtle than this, and I'm not denying the role of the Soviet Union. But such explanations to me deny any real agency to the Mongolians themselves, and ignore the complexity of what was going on in Mongolia in the 1930s. In short, I'm trying to complicate our understanding of the 1930s in Mongolia, while at the same time saying something anthropologically interesting and useful about state power and political violence.
One of these days, I'll come back and expand upon this a bit more, but for now, this will have to do. Other tasks call.
The Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia
This is what I'm actually doing in Cambridge these days. I'm the Project Manager for a big project on The Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia. Check the links page to find the website for the project. (Although the website deperately needs updating.) We aim to collect over 500 oral history interviews on various aspects of life in Mongolia during the twentieth century, and in so doing, learn some useful things not only about Mongolia, but memory, narrative and state processes as well. We also hope, of course, that it will serve as a cultural heritage resource for Mongolians themselves.